Biology

Top Resources

Before you begin your information and data journey in the Biological Sciences, give some consideration to career choices you have (or might). The UB Career Services Office is your “One-Stop-Shop” for making the first connections between the classes you take and the career path you envision. iSciWNY partially supported by UB’s Educational Opportunity Center and the New York Center of Excellence for Bioinformatics and Life Sciences, is a career planning resource for high school through graduate students. These are excellent resources to consult for making decisions about courses for matching your career aspirations.

ebrary Academic Complete is a dynamic collection of over 120,000 e-books across a wide variety of academic disciplines. The collection mainly includes e-books that were first published in recent decades, but also provides access to selected classic works. Most e-books are in English, though some are in other European languages. Stable links directly to e-books and e-book chapters may be inserted into UBlearns for curricular use.
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This online encyclopedia is the online version of the 20-volume encyclopedia of the same name, including introductory and scholarly articles, general interest essays, and news in the biological and life sciences. It is completely linked and cross-referenced internally and externally. Full-text online access goes only to 2009, Updates are not available.
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Provides access to Chemical Abstracts (1907 to present) and MEDLINE (~1958 to present), and includes detailed and comprehensive coverage of biological chemistry, biochemistry, as well as the chemical aspects of ecology and environmental science, physiology, molecular biology and genetics. You must register for an individual user i.d. before using this product.More Info

The ISI-Thompson database, Web of Science provides access to the Arts & Humanities Citation Index, the Social Sciences Citation Index, and the Science Citation Index from 1965 to the present and allows for users to search for papers citing previously published works.
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MEDLINE is produced by the U.S. National Library of Medicine and primarily covers the fields related to medicine and biomedical research, including biochemistry, physiology, anatomy, nutrition, toxicology and environmental health, genetics and structural and molecular biology. MEDLINE uses a controlled vocabulary, Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), for indexing articles and for searching. Coverage is from 1966 to the present. (see also: SciFinder Scholar).
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Databases & Other Web Resources

AGRICOLA (Agricultural Online Access) is the U.S. National Agricultural Library's bibliographic database to identify journal articles, government documents, technical reports, books, patents, and audiovisual resources from agricultural sources, including botany, ecology, environmental science, freshwater and marine sciences, and forestry from 1970 to the present.
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The Journal STORage database provides archival coverage on many scientific and technical journals including those in the life and biological sciences. The thrust of this database is to provide full-text access to the most important academic journals. JSTOR provides excellent historical coverage of biological topics. You may find that some journals do not have coverage for up to six of the most recent years (embargoed). Check the UB Libraries to see if we have a current subscription to that journal. You can also 'browse' the database by specific subject areas, such as: Aquatic Science, Biological Sciences, Botany and Plant Sciences, Developmental and Cell Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Science, and Zoology.
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This special Public Web Site provides access to the full-text and bibliographic records of DOE research and development reports in the sciences, including multidisciplinary coverage of environmental and energy sciences.
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GEOBASE is a multi-disciplinary database that focuses on social geography, physical geography, ecology, biology, oceanography, and earth science. The database provides current coverage of over 1,800 journals and archive coverage of several thousand additional titles.
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Provides references plus abstracts (as well as selected full text) to journal
articles and conference papers in all areas of engineering and applied science
for the years 1884-present. It also provides a great deal of information on biomechanics, biotechnology and the physical and engineering perspectives of biological research.
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Diane Schmidt, the biology librarian at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign maintains a comprehensive database of field guides at the International Field Guides Web Site. The database is an update and continuance of her book, A Guide to Field Guides: Identifying the Natural History of North America (SEL/UGL Reference: QH102 .S36 1999; Libraries Unlimited, 1999)
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Annual Reviews, published by a non-profit organization by that same name, are a set of monographic series providing critical reviews of current research in 50 biomedical, life, physical, and social sciences disciplines.
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The University Libraries features the "Everything" search engine with an efficient and effective way for identifying information across many separate resources from a single search box, now the default finding tool on the UB Libraries Home Page. "Everything" is a useful tool in your library research arsenal. Users have access to a powerful information-finding tool that answers most, if not all, of their needs. However, there are circumstances where digging deeper into a subject and with the Libraries "subject-specific databases" is the appropriate enhanced strategy.
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The Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE) is an online journal of visualized (video-based) biological and life science research procedures and methods. Articles published in JoVE focus on experimental techniques and procedures used in laboratory settings for conducting research. These procedures are captured and displayed as videos with written explanations that include graphics and illustrations, and are enhanced with narrations and explanations in video formats. Coverage is facilitated from Vol. 1 (2006) to the near present, excluding the two most recent years with exceptions: some articles published within the past two years may be available due to requirements to have certain resources in the public domain available. This also means that some articles published within the past two years may not be available due to publisher restrictions.

Encyclopedias, Directories, Handbooks

SEL/UGL Ref QD415 A25 E53 Vol. 1-4
A comprehensive and authoritative work covering more than 500 articles on
related to "the chemistry of the the compounds and process [constituting]
living organisms."

SEL/UGL Ref QH440.2 G455 vol. 1 Genetics, vol. 2 Cell Biology
Facts on File produces user-friendly guides serving as overviews of the
fundamentals of biology in two volumes. Each are richly illustrated with
black and white illustrations with easy-to-read text. glossary of terms,
and a compilation of selected Internet sites.

The National Biological Information Infrastructure has compiled a useful list of resources for scientific names and naming conventions, Systematics, and related disciplines; a very good site to identify the scientific (Genus species) names of plants and animals.

Scientists have launched a new national initiative to build a research and end-user community dedicated to developing a Network Integrated Biocollections Alliance (NIBA). The project is an outgrowth of recent scientific meetings in which scientists have articulated a need to digitally capture biological specimens and associated data held in natural science collections for use in research, education, and for the public interest.

Undergraduate and graduate students and alumni may wish to explore classes in mathematics not taught at the University at Buffalo. Online courses have been increasing in their numbers, numbers of students taking them, and increasing the abilities to learn a new subject, stay abreast of topics, or supplement an existing degree. This is a list of more than 11 courses in the biological sciences. There are also several other courses in microbiology http://www.onlinecourses.com/microbiology/ (5), and science http://www.onlinecourses.com/science/ (15), including environmental science courses.